The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
14 — Wednesday, November 18, 2020 
statement

Last Saturday I stood in Chicago, across 

the river from Trump International Hotel 
& Tower, surrounded by a crowd of strang-
ers. I’d found out the election results half an 
hour earlier, by way of a CNN push notifica-
tion, on the 23rd floor of my dad’s apartment 
building. Within minutes, the honking and 
cheering pouring through the 12-inch glass 
window was too loud to ignore. I saw the ca-
maraderie as an undeniable invitation to the 
celebration, ditched the homework I’d begun 
only minutes before, grabbed my camera and 
jumped in the elevator. 

I arrived onto the scene at Wacker Drive, 

a little out of breath after sprinting down 
Michigan Avenue. Small clusters of people 
milled around, eyeing each other excitedly. A 
woman walked past in front of me; noticing 
we had the same mask and smile hidden be-
hind it, I raised my camera to take her photo. 
She paused mid-stride and looked directly 
at me, framed almost perfectly by the raised 
Wabash bridge beyond her. The irony was 
too good. 

(The Wabash Bridge, the only way to the 

base of Trump Tower, has been raised on 
and off for weeks “as part of a precautionary 
measure to ensure the safety of residents.” 
The street remains closed down a block be-
yond the tower, enforced by a multitude of 
maskless Chicago police officers.) 

The woman passed through the frame, 

then, seeing the excitement in my eyes and 
body language, turned around to chat. 

“I didn’t know where to go or what to do!” 

she said, breathlessly. “I just found out the 
results and I wanted to be with people, so I 
came here.” 

She wasn’t alone in that sentiment. I 

stayed, watched and photographed for two 
hours on Wacker as more people streamed 
in, taking note of the growing festivities: Cars 
pulled over to take videos, three different 
people popped bottles of champagne, some-
one played “The Wicked Witch is Dead” over 
their speaker, the crowd sang “We Are the 
Champions” not once but twice, a drummer 
set up shop, a city worker dedicated his shift 
to driving his street cleaner back and forth, 
honking relentlessly. 

Oh, the joy. It radiated from everyone in 

the crowd, almost none of whom knew each 
other. Eventually, the police blocked both 
sides of the street to traffic, triggering an im-
promptu block party. It seemed as if in that 
moment, like the woman I briefly spoke to, 
everyone wanted to be with people. But why?

***
In times of high emotion, whether posi-

tive — like joy, excitement or relief — or nega-
tive — like loss, pain or grief — humans have 
always come together. We hold protests, 
vigils, riots, rallies, and celebrations, among 
many other gatherings. 

LSA senior Amytess Girgis, a student or-

ganizer who works with the Lecturers’ Em-
ployee Organization and a variety of student 
organizations fighting for equity and justice, 
has helped organize many different func-
tions for these purposes.

“Our primary focus, when organizing 

gatherings is to create pockets of liberation, 
where people can envision the world as it 
should be,” she said. “And so what that looks 
like is creating accessible spaces. Spaces 
where folks with any kind of need can have a 
presence and not feel like some kind of bur-
den or unwelcome. We create spaces of joy … 
and then, of course, it’s bringing speakers in 
that can inspire folks and tell stories. But ul-
timately, the types of community gatherings 
I want to be a part of are the ones that tell the 
story of who we want to be and help people 
believe that that’s possible.”

The emotions I felt on Wacker Drive were 

exactly that: I was seeing, and participating 
in, a future that I hadn’t thought was possi-
ble four years ago. First and foremost, it was 
a collective sigh of relief that our democracy 
wouldn’t be toppled. Then, at least for me, it 
was a reinforcement that love, acceptance, 
inclusion, diversity, morality and empathy 
were still alive and persevering in our coun-
try. 

This wasn’t an organized protest, or even 

an organized gathering. It was a completely 
spontaneous gathering of people of every 
ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity and age. 
We’d previously only felt that joy in micro-
cosmic spaces we’d deliberately constructed. 
Suddenly, those spaces bled together in the 
Chicago streets as a celebration of shared 
freedoms. 

“To me, fundamentally, humans reach 

their most joyous selves with other humans,” 
Girgis told me. “And when we gather in spac-
es to celebrate our ties, even if those ties are 
from common struggle, we are creating the 
hope that, at least at the end of the world, we 
can still love each other.” 

Yet as endearing of a sentiment that is, our 

nation is as divided as we’ve ever been. There 
was an entire demographic of the country 
not celebrating in America’s streets last Sat-
urday — one that instead had their moment 
in November 2016. The concept of celebrat-
ing shared principles and values isn’t limited 
to one side, but right now, it seems to be one 
side at a time. 

The Black Lives Matter movement, found-

ed by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal 
Tometi in July 2013, has long used protesting 
in the streets to form coherence around the 
treatment of Black people in America. This 
past year, America exploded into anger after 
the killings of George Floyd in May and Bre-
onna Taylor in March, with 74% of Ameri-
cans saying they support the protests and 15 
to 26 million people participating in them. 

But the movement quickly fell prey to the 

“Black is thug” narrative, which evolved into 
“Black protest is riot.” By definition, rioting 
is a form of gathering. Sometimes it’s a crowd 
out of control. Sometimes it’s a deliberate 
tactic of deterrence, like at the University of 
Mississippi in 1962, when a white crowd ri-
oted to block James Meredith, the first Black 
student at Ole Miss, from attending classes. 
Rioting’s historical significance and current 
narrative have been marred by those who 
deem it an illegitimate form of expression. 

“The reason why the Black Lives Matter 

protests were immediately billed as riots is 
because of how we define violence in a coun-
try like America, and in many other places 
that lean heavily on capitalist ideologies and 
racist ideologies,” Girgis explained. “And by 
that I mean that violence on property is the 
equivalent to violence on real bodies. Vio-

lence on the stock market is the equivalence 
of violence on real bodies.” 

It’s true that small riots have spurned from 

protests this past year. But it’s also true that 
historically, rioting has been perpetrated by 
people of all races, not just Black communi-
ties, and as a movement, Black Lives Matter 
has largely decided to fight inequity and in-
justice with love and community. 

“By combating and countering acts of vio-

lence, creating space for Black imagination 
and innovation, and centering Black joy, we 
are winning immediate improvements in our 
lives,” their mission statement reads. 

Its principles are clear, and its materials 

readily available for people to utilize in or-
ganizing a community event, rendering the 
movement impossible to pin down. It can’t 
be eradicated — it’s not just an organization, 
but a community of people who believe in 
a better future, organizing tangible spaces 
where that belief rings true. 

Joy has been part of Black resistance for 

a long time. “We can actively trace the spa-
tial and temporal control of Black expression 
from slavery and colonialism through to to-
day,” wrote Chanté Joseph in Vogue this past 
summer. “This is why the act of joy is resis-
tance and as we use our physical bodies to pro-
test, march and demand change, we must also 
use them to experience the pleasure of joy.” 

For BIPOC in America, and around the 

world, just existing is an act of resistance. 
Girgis pointed out how central oral traditions 
are to these communities — music, dance and 
art are embedded in their protest. “‘We Shall 
Overcome’ is one of the most famous move-
ment songs of all time that sort of carries the 
waves of the civil rights movement,” she said. 

On Saturday, the music leaned a little more 

toward “FDT” by YG and Nipsey Hussle — 
cars drove past with the song blaring, drench-
ing the crowd in an energy and freedom they’d 
been missing. That energy couldn’t be con-
tained. And perhaps “FDT” is less traditional 
than “We Shall Overcome,” but the sentiment 
still remains the same: A community’s art and 
culture is woven into the way it decides to 
gather together. 

In the Candlelight Revolution of 2016 and 

2017, millions of South Koreans took to the 
streets every Saturday for 20 straight weeks, 
demanding President Park Geun-hye’s res-
ignation and the upholding of democracy. 

The protests were entirely peaceful, focusing 
around art and entertainment. Youngju Ryu, 
associate professor of Asian Languages and 
Cultures at the University of Michigan, teach-
es a class titled “The Candlelight Revolution: 
Democracy and Protest in South Korea,” and 
spoke to me about the impact of the incredibly 
successful demonstrations.

“Throughout the day, this space became 

the destination for anyone who wanted to 
express themselves,” she said. “You had a lot 
of homespun posters, a lot of performances, 
like puppet shows, you had incredibly satiri-
cal examples of what we would call ‘laughtiv-
ism.’ So people could go and just walk around 
and enjoy all these examples of creative and 
politically engaged voices, and then collec-
tively come together in the evening, listen to 
speeches by prominent figures and sing to-
gether.”

She continued to speak about a sort of col-

lective effervescence found in these scenes. 

“The spectacularity of a million people, 

holding up those candles together ... is some-
thing that became an essential part of show-
ing, first of all, how many people there are, 
and how beautiful it is … I think what helped 
the protests is, again, kind of understanding 
the nature of a large crowd like that, and mak-
ing sure that they remain entertained.” 

Almost a third of South Korea’s population 

turned out in the cold winter, week after week 
— so much so that Ryu noted a sense of loss 
after the impeachment was victorious. After 
20 weeks of turning out together in pursuit of 
a common goal, they suddenly found them-
selves with free Saturdays. 

“What’s bringing people together?” Ryu 

asked. “A strong sense of mission for pro-
tecting democracy that was hard fought and 
hard won ... faith in the power of the masses 
to bring about such a change, because they’ve 
done it before.” She continued, “They have 
this kind of relationship to democracy that I 
think is more visceral because they experi-
enced authoritarianism in their own lifetime. 
Many of them fought against earlier, authori-
tarian regimes in their youth. And so the de-
mocracy that they have is something that they 
have to protect — that they won with their 
own hands.”

When thousands 
share one emotion

BY ANNIE KLUSENDORF, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

PHOTO BY ANNIE KLUSENDORF

